Jackson Rutledge struck out nine batters in a five-inning start for the Single-A Hagerstown Suns on Aug. 28, allowing just one hit and one earned run on the road against North Carolina’s Kannapolis Cannon Ballers.
He couldn’t have known it at the time, but that was the last time Rutledge would pitch in a live game for quite some time — almost 10 months and counting.
“Feels like it’s been a little bit longer than that,” Rutledge said in a recent interview.
Just a year after the Washington Nationals selected him in the first round of the MLB draft at No. 17 overall, Rutledge has ascended to become the top-ranked pitching prospect in the team’s farm system, according to MLB Pipeline.
Simultaneously, he’s been set back like every other minor league baseball player as the coronavirus has put their seasons on hold, leaving some players in financial jeopardy.
ESPN reported late last month that “hundreds” of minor leaguers were cut as major league organizations sought ways to tighten their belts during the pandemic. The Nationals were among the teams to do so. They also agreed to pay their minor leaguers a weekly $400 stipend through September — after nearly shrinking it to $300 a week at the beginning of June.
“First of all, anyone in baseball can agree that this whole lockdown and delay, possibly canceling the season, isn’t good for baseball at all in general,” Rutledge said. “As far as the minor league goes, it was really unfortunate a couple weeks ago to see some of my good friends that I had played with get released, I think unnecessarily.”
He said those former teammates would still have jobs if the season hadn’t been canceled. The potential ripple effects could be massive.
“There are so many guys who are undrafted free agents or really late-round guys who end up being big-leaguers and end up having great careers that, unfortunately, wouldn’t happen if we went to that,” Rutledge said. “But I don’t think it’s really in our control at this point.”
The 2020 season would have been Rutledge’s first full year as a professional, so he was most looking forward to getting himself used to a five-day schedule, the way major league starting pitchers operate.
“It’s more about the routine of things and how consistent you can be,” Rutledge said, “not really just gearing up for that Friday start or that Saturday start or whatever, like I did in college. It’s more about going out, being consistent every time.”
Instead, Rutledge has stayed with his parents in St. Louis since the pandemic first forced baseball to close its training camp facilities in March.
The 21-year-old had moved down to Florida in January, far in advance of the Nationals’ report date, to get in some work that he couldn’t do in a cold Missouri winter.
To stay in shape during the pandemic, he was relegated to the basement for a while, where he did workouts with resistance bands — and even utilized some Home Depot buckets of concrete for deadlifting and squatting.
“And sneaking over to the high school to play catch with my dad. His hand was hurting by the end of it,” Rutledge said.
Calling St. Louis home meant that Rutledge was a big Cardinals fan “until June of last year,” as he puts it, when the Nationals drafted him. When the Cardinals hosted Washington in Games 1 and 2 of the National League Championship Series in October, Rutledge headed to Busch Stadium for both games — decked out in Nationals gear.
It was “one of the weirdest experiences that I’ve ever had at a baseball game,” Rutledge said, to hear hometown fans yelling at him to “go back to Washington.”
Whenever he does get back to Washington, a climb up the minor leagues is still in the cards. Rutledge expected he would start 2020 with the Single-A Fredericksburg Nationals in Virginia; if things were going well for the prospect, he might have seen Double-A. MLB Pipeline lists Rutledge’s “estimated time of arrival” in the majors as 2022.
Only infielders Carter Kieboom — who might have made Washington’s opening day roster — and Luis Garcia rate ahead of Rutledge in the Nationals’ system, per MLB Pipeline. But it isn’t something that Rutledge closely follows.
“Based on my experience, the guys that do rankings, they absolutely do the best job, but it doesn’t always mean everything,” he said. “There’s certain things that people who make rankings don’t know. So I try to just work like I have something to prove, like I’m trying to make the team. And so I’m continuing to keep that mindset, like I had when I was in junior college, where I was kind of a nobody at first and still trying to prove myself. I try to keep that sort of mindset all the time — constantly trying to prove myself and be the best I possibly could be.”
Rutledge stands out in a farm system crowded with pitchers. When the Nationals picked Oklahoma right-handed pitcher Cade Cavalli in the first round of this month’s draft, it extended their streak of taking a pitcher in the first round to five years running.
Before Washington drafted Rutledge out of San Jacinto College near Houston, they’d already been loading up on pitching talent in the form of Mason Denaburg (2018) and Seth Romero (2017).
As luck would have it, the Nationals looked back to San Jacinto to draft another pitcher this year, Mitchell Parker, in the fifth and final round. Rutledge and Parker overlapped for one year at the community college. Rutledge praised Parker’s work ethic and said they’ll be able to push each other again, now that they’ll be reunited.
“I told him to get up to St. Louis. We could start working out together again, get some live ABs,” Rutledge said.
Unfortunately, that’s all the minor leaguers can do for now, as the 2020 season and the near future hang in limbo.
• Adam Zielonka can be reached at azielonka@washingtontimes.com.
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